Yoshitake Kenji, President of the Dream Street Shopping Arcade Merchants' Association, abruptly slid open the little glass window, pointed to the eaves, and said, "We want to get rid of this swallows' nest." Tomi opened her sunken eyes in surprise. How long did a swallow live?--the question had preoccupied her recently, and just now she'd been absorbed in thoughts about swallows.
      "Get rid of it?" Like Yoshitake, she spoke the language of southern Osaka.
      "That's right. There was a meeting of the Association last night. A majority vote. People said the swallows' nest under the eaves of this tobacco stand impedes the future development of the Dream Street Shopping Arcade."
      "Why is that?"
      Yoshitake cleared his throat, leaned forward, and glanced around the interior of Tomi's shop as he groped for words. "Well, you see, well . . ." In fact, it was not the swallows' nest he wanted to dislodge, but Tomi, who held the rights to a one-mat space in the Furukawa Stationery Shop. Trying to look both stern and gentle at the same time, he knitted his brows and smiled. The demands that this attempt made on his facial muscles gave rise to faint twitches all over. Rattled, he rubbed his face with both hands.
      "We've got to make plans to attract customers from farther away. We've got to make the shops look more modern. People have been saying so for a long time, and that's why Mr. Tai repainted his walls and enlarged his show-window. The Muratas remodelled their clock shop last summer, too. And it seems the Furukawas want to strip off this dirty old siding and replace it with a mortar wall. The swallows' nest will be in the way."
      Tomi gave this some thought. "And the people of the shopping arcade decided by majority vote to get rid of the swallows' nest, so the Furukawas can renovate their shop?" She couldn't believe that the Dream Street crowd would exchange opinions about a swallows' nest for the benefit of someone else's shop. She knew everything about the people of Dream Street--their family customs, their financial problems, their secret thoughts. For thirty-four years, Iseki Tomi had been sitting in her three-by-six shop in a corner of the shopping arcade, watching the residents through her little glass window. She simply watched; she was no busybody, peering into people's houses. But she'd come to know the residents of the arcade as well as if she'd placed them, one by one, on the palm of her hand and studied them. For thirty-four years, since the age of forty-three, she'd looked out silently and guilelessly from her sunless shop; and, though she didn't realize it, she'd gained from this the power to see people.
      Yoshitake was angry with himself for letting this oval-faced old woman, her white hair pulled back in a bun, give him a hard time; but he mustn't let her suspect that the Furukawas had asked him to get her out.
      "As it is, you've got to feel sorry for the swallows," he said, changing strategy. "When they come back and find their nests gone, they'll probably be confused at first. But if they fly just a little way into the country, they'll find lots of places where the air is cleaner and there's more to eat than here in the dirty old city. They'll size up the situation, move to the country, and build new nests. I think they'd be happier there; don't you?"
      "Yes, you might be right."
      Hearing Tomi's response, Yoshitake Kenji thought his spontaneous change in strategy had worked. He'd better not steamroll ahead; it'd be smarter to give Tomi a little time. "The swallows'll be coming soon," he said, with a theatrical glance at the sky. Then he headed back toward Dream Hall, the pachinko parlor he operated. Tomi glanced at the plywood partition separating her shop from the stationer. The Furukawas might be desperate to get rid of her, she thought, but she held an irrefutable certificate of title. Dark, damp, and enclosed on three sides with plywood, Tomi's tobacco stand resembled an isolation cell. Stacks of cardboard boxes, full of cigarettes, threatened to collapse on her if she didn't move carefully. It was the Furukawas who'd turned Tomi's stand into an isolation cell. There'd been no plywood partition five years ago; but when the Furukawas decided to install a new display case and decorate the wall behind it with stylish wallpaper, they didn't negotiate--they issued something close to a peremptory demand, and Tomi could only acquiesce.
      The Furukawa Stationery Shop originally belonged to Tomi's husband. Four years after the end of the Second World War, the postwar black markets were either razed or turned into shopping districts. The name "Dream Street Shopping Arcade" was imposed on the place by people who began to use it as their base of operations long after Tomi had come. Before that, it'd been a tidied-up black market, a nameless shopping street on the edge of Osaka. Tomi's husband, who worked for a large stationer in Kitahama before the war, had considered his age, sold off the Kochi farmland his parents had left him, and bought property which provided both a business and a residence on this shopping street. Having lost their only son on the battlefield, she and her husband nurtured no bold desires or dreams; it would be enough if they could maintain a business and a residence that would allow them to live quietly together. Less than six months after opening the shop, Tomi's husband died. On his way home from the bath one evening, he'd suddenly pressed a hand to his chest, dropped to his knees, and expired right there on the street. Tomi knew nothing about running a business. In that time of shortages, it was nearly impossible for a woman on her own to stock notebooks and pencils. Just as she was wondering what to do, Furukawa Ken'ichi, who'd worked with her husband in Kitahama before the war, came calling and offered to buy the land and the shop. Tomi was within an ace of accepting his proposal without question, but then a little incident taught her some worldly wisdom. Ten days after her husband's sudden death, she bought a skinny daikon which turned out to be rotten inside when she sliced it with a kitchen knife. She took it back to the greengrocer the next day to complain. In twenty-four hours, the price of daikon had doubled. She asked for a new daikon in exchange for the spoiled one. The greengrocer replied that Tomi had chosen the vegetable herself and it was too late to make an exchange. Tomi was too timid to argue.
      "It's inflation, ma'am, inflation," said the grocer. "See for yourself. The very same daikon costs twice as much today. Things the way they are nowadays, you don't know what'll happen to your money. It's like waste paper. Things are worth more than scraps of paper. Throw away the spoiled part, cut the outside into strips, and boil it with soy sauce. That's better than buying a new daikon at these prices, isn't it?"
      Tomi started for home, clutching the daikon to her breast. So there's no telling how far paper money will fall in value, she said to herself. She mustn't be in a rush to sell her property to Furukawa Ken'ichi. She pictured herself staring blankly at a bundle of worthless yen notes. When Furukawa came calling the next day, Tomi told him she'd decided not to sell. Furukawa persisted. When Tomi haltingly explained her reasons, Furukawa offered a compromise. He really wanted to acquire the entire property, but he'd be willing to leave Tomi with a piece of her own. That way she'd retain the space to carry on a small business, enough to support herself as a woman living alone, and she'd also secure the money she needed right away. Pondering this, Tomi decided it was indeed a splendid plan; but she asked Furukawa to wait several days for her reply. In that short time, she'd consider what sort of business she could handle. She consulted her only relative, her late husband's younger brother.
      "No physical work, no complicated purchasing or transactions, and a small space--that would be a tobacco stand." Such was her brother-in-law's conclusion. A tobacco stand. What a good idea. It would be a cash business; and since tobacco was now a state monopoly, she'd heard, she'd never be cheated on her purchases; all she'd have to do was to sit in her shop. She could handle that. The net profit would be small, of course, but she needed just enough to live alone modestly. Tomi made up her mind.
      Furukawa looked relieved. "Two mats of space would be enough for a tobacco stand, wouldn't it? Wait, you won't need two mats, you can do a fine business with just one!" His manner betrayed his eagerness to get the name on the registration changed to his own as quickly as possible. Asking her brother-in-law to serve as a witness, Tomi handed the registration papers to Furukawa in exchange for the money. Then she checked, again and again, the certificate granting her the right to use one mat's space of the land and the building, facing the street on the east side of the stationery shop; and she had Furukawa press his seal to it.
      Less than four days after Tomi had hung out the sign of her tobacco stand, a pair of swallows began to build a nest under the projecting eaves of her tile roof. Watching the two swallows laboring on their nest with what seemed to her both heroism and desperation, Tomi murmured to herself, "Swallows are building a nest under the roof of my shop."
      She began to feel confident that good fortune in some form, however slight, would visit her life from now on. This was not just because of the saying that happiness comes to a house where swallows build their nests. Recalling how the swallows had flitted back and forth under the eaves of her shop for two days before they began their work, Tomi decided that the swallow couple, having decided to nest here, had mutely been seeking her permission and, at the same time, had been observing what kind of person she was. In her loneliness, Tomi felt as though she were being blessed unexpectedly with children. She knew nothing about swallows, except that they flew in from the south in the spring, laid their eggs, hatched and raised their chicks, and returned to the south in the fall. She didn't really know which countries in "the south;" but she fantasized that her son, drafted by the army and killed in battle on New Guinea, had come back to his mother in the form of a swallow. No good came of being born a human. How much more fortunate to be reborn as a swallow and soar freely in the sky. A swallow wouldn't be forced to join the army, leave his loved ones, and carry a rifle when he had no desire to kill anyone. With these thoughts in her heart, Tomi would step from her shop many times during the day to watch as the earthen, bowl-shaped nest grew. She welcomed these unexpected dependents. She even felt love for the agile birds, wrapped in their greenish-black luster. When the rain continued to fall for days on end, concern that the chicks would starve caused her to lose her appetite. In the years that followed, Tomi learned several things about swallows. They usually laid four to six eggs. It was almost always the female that sat on the eggs; and the eggs would hatch in about three weeks. The swallows didn't necessarily return to the same nest every year.
      In the years when April passed without the swallows returning to their nest under the tile roof of her shop, Tomi would feel alone in the world, and her thoughts would turn to the past. In years when the swallows came, relief and joy would turn her thoughts to the future. She believed that only death lay in her future. But when the swallows returned and laid their eggs, and Tomi finally heard the robust squawking of the chicks demanding food, it seemed to her that death was the beginning of something new. She would be imbued with a strange, quiet courage.
      She always kept the shop open until eight o'clock at night. At seven-thirty, she'd put the day's proceeds into a small leather pouch with a long string attached and tie it firmly around her waist. Locking the glass window, she'd step into the narrow alley that separated her from the neighboring White Lily Beauty Parlor, lock the door of her shop, and return to her apartment, a ten-minute walk from the Dream Street Shopping Arcade.
      As Tomi got ready to go home that night, she wondered why Yoshitake Kenji, who undoubtedly had been solicited by the Furukawas, began his scheme to oust her by trying to get rid of the swallows' nest. Even if the nest vanished, there'd be no incentive for her to move out. The day her tobacco stand disappeared from a corner of the Furukawa Stationery Shop would be the day she died. There was no need to hurry things along. With a hand over her heart, which had begun to beat irregularly these two or three years, she opened the glass window and leaned out. She looked toward the entrance of the shopping arcade. For a time she waited for Satomi Shunta to come home from work, but finally she gave up. She liked the young man, Satomi Shunta. It's true there was something muddleheaded in his expression and in the way he spoke; but there were also times when a single-minded passion, obstinacy, and resolve would flash in his eyes like the gleam of a dog's eyes in the dark. Her son, killed in battle at the age of twenty, had had the same quality. Tomi would think of her beloved son whenever she spoke with Satomi Shunta, and for an instant a fierce anger would raise gooseflesh on her frail body. Her anger was directed neither at the enemy nation nor at the enemy soldier who'd killed him, but at the Japanese policy makers who, with a simple postcard, would snatch a son from his mother, a husband from his wife. Like most old people, Tomi lived in the past more often than not. Sometimes she'd gaze into the distance with unfocussed eyes and drift into a revery as she recalled the day she first took her five-year-old son to the beach, or the way he trotted back and forth naked between the men's and women's sections of the public bath, even after he'd reached the fifth grade. It was always at such times that Satomi Shunta came to buy cigarettes. A coincidence, no doubt; but it was also a reason for the special feelings that Tomi had for Shunta.
      Tomi locked the door of her shop and took five or six steps before she heard the roar of motorcycles. Two bikes came streaking down the middle of Dream Street and slammed on their brakes near Tomi. Two helmeted men clutching long, steel bars jumped off the bikes and smashed the glass window of Tomi's shop. Then they broke through the wood siding, sent the sign flying, snapped the lock, stepped into the shop, and tossed all the unopened cardboard boxes out onto the pavement. Using the pointed ends of their steel bars, they made a honeycomb of the walls, and then began to punch holes in the cartons of new cigarettes. Tomi at first had no idea what was going on.
      "That should do it," said one of the men. As the motorcycles disappeared, the residents of the shopping arcade came running. Tomi knew: it wasn't that the bikes were gone by the time the residents arrived; the residents watched the bikes go before they flocked to the scene. "What happened?" It was the voice of the son and heir to the Tai Liquor Store.
      "Tomi-san, are you all right?" This was the voice of Mr. Wang, of the Taroken Chinese restaurant.
      Dizzy, Tomi staggered. She felt sick at her stomach. Her heart raced, then stopped, then began to beat wildly again. She sat heavily on the pavement. She thought that she was still standing. She moved her legs, intending to walk toward the shop; but what the residents saw was Tomi falling slowly backward, to all appearances dead.
      The police had to wait three days before they could take Tomi's statement. She regained consciousness as soon as the ambulance brought her to the hospital; but her arrhythmia showed no improvement, and she began talking to herself. Her words, now mingled with tears, now with smiles, grew more passionate with time and flowed ceaselessly from her mouth.
      "If you wave your net around like that, you'll break the dragonflies' wings. Foolish boy, only catching drone beetles. I'll have to get your father to scold you. Ah! watch where you're going. How many times do I have to tell you? Watch where you're going when you walk in the street, or you'll fall in the sewage ditch. The next time you fall in the ditch, I won't let you off with just a knock on the forehead. What's this? you come back crying from a fight with a girl? And then you hit Mother's behind. You couldn't win an argument with a girl, could you? Crybaby. Aha, you're hiding something from Mother. You can't fool me. You came from inside me, you know. . . ."
      The doctor injected a strong sedative and set up a continuous intravenous drip of nutrients mixed with a cardiac. Then he spoke to Satomi Shunta, who'd arrived out of breath at the hospital twenty minutes after Tomi was carried in, and had been at her side ever since: the shock had left her in a temporary state of dementia. The electrocardiogram showed indications of severe angina pectoris; he intended to carry out a detailed examination when her condition stabilized. . . .
      Gazing at the ceiling, Tomi continued her soliloquy after the doctor left the room. "People go on about unfilial children, and a child who dies before his parents is the most unfilial of all. But you're not unfilial. You were dragged off by the army and killed in the war. You were twenty. Did you have a girlfriend? It's all right, Mother's here."
      Tomi's voice grew fainter, then intermittent, until finally she closed her eyes. Fearfully, Satomi Shunta held the palm of his hand to her nostrils. She was breathing. Relieved, he left the room, went to the smoking area, and lit a cigarette. He felt an uncontrollable anger toward something he couldn't define. It wasn't directed at the two men who destroyed Tomi's shop, nor at the people of Dream Street who looked on from their shop fronts and second-floor windows without intervening. He didn't sleep that night, sitting in a chair beside Tomi's bed. He mulled over the words she'd been mumbling to herself. It was after three o'clock in the morning when Tomi's pulse returned to normal and the thick intravenous needle was pulled from a blood vessel in her arm. And it was then that Shunta finally realized that the loathing he felt was for all of society, or, in other words, for humanity itself. Tomi had never told Shunta anything about her past. Nevertheless, he felt as though he understood completely, from Tomi's demented, disjointed, but not incoherent mumblings, what this woman's seventy-seven years of life had been.
      With the doctor's permission, a middle-aged policeman asked Tomi if she had any idea who was responsible. Confidently, her voice shaking slightly, she replied, "I think it was Yoshitake Kenji and Mr. and Mrs. Furukawa." Anger brought tears to her small, sunken eyes. Tomi explained how for decades the Furukawas had wanted to evict her, how they'd harassed her in countless ways to that end, and how Yoshitake--on the very day of the incident--had come to threaten her over the swallows' nest. There was no doubt in Tomi's mind. As evidence, she told the policeman, "Two days before, the Furukawas said there was a death in the family and went to Nagoya. They closed the shop and went away to hide the fact that they were behind it all. There's no question about it."
      She'd lived honestly; she'd never done anything to cause anyone resentment. After making this assertion, Tomi began to have difficulty breathing and pressed a hand to her chest. The doctor was called; the electrocardiogram machine was brought in. The paroxysm passed quickly.
      Yoshitake was summoned to the police station first. Word spread in a flash among the residents of Dream Street Shopping Arcade.